Usefully Useless

Click here. It’s a video clip which you’re not allowed to view due to a copyright claim from BBC Worldwide. The clip is Top Gear related stuff, as far as I’m aware it was never shown on the show.

Since as a UK resident and licence fee payer, I have automatic right to view BBC content, I’m wondering what the hell they’re playing at.

Now I’m no clueless amateur with Photoshop but the best artisan is always limited by the tools available. In my case, that tool is a Kodak Easyshare CX6200. Now Kodak’s consumer point and shoots aren’t exactly the greatest snappers and the Easyshare series are fairly close to the bottom. It’s a creaky old 2.0 megapixel (1600×1200) disaster.

The objective was to capture noctilucent clouds: Night time photography. This is all but impossible on a point and shoot, they simply don’t have the exposure or the sensitivity. The longest exposure it can do is half a second and the sensor is noisy as hell. A crop of a shot from the session is to the right, but brightened up a bit since this blog has a white background.

It’s a foul mess of noise and hot pixels, and while you can indeed see the clouds, it’s hardly a great image and there’s only so much you can do in Photoshop. Garbage in, garbage out. There had to be some way to give Photoshop more information about the image.

There is. Using a small mini-tripod (that’s why the hole at the bottom of your camera has threads), I placed the camera on the ground and fired off 18 shots, then covered the lens and did another. It’s imperative that the camera does not move and your subject is absolutely still.

In Photoshop, you then load the 19th (dark) image and subtract it from all the others using the Apply Image function. This removes junk added by the sensor such as hot pixels. It’s called darkfield subtraction and commonly used by amateur astronomers for exactly the same purpose.

The next step is to add all these images together. This CAN be done in Photoshop but it’d probably take forever. I use a piece of freeware called RegiStax 5 for it which has an incredibly awful interface. It adds all the images together and averages them, a process known as stacking. Noise, which is random from frame to frame, does not survive the averaging, but the detail of the image reinforces from frame to frame.

You then drop it into Photoshop, pull the curves around a bit and you get an image far better than any one shot could have been with much less noise.

If there was a hall of fame for bad cinematography, Star Trek movies would probably be the top ten. With Enterprise being cancelled just as it was getting into stride, can Star Trek resurrect the franchise?

In short, scroll down for the answer, a review follows. No spoilers.

Director JJ Abrams delivers a truly mesmerising epic in his reboot. There are plenty of nods to Gene Roddenberry’s masterpiece but even the casual movie goer can make sense of this sci-fi masterwork. Yes, there’s time-travel involved, it’s Star Trek, what did you expect?

Yep, we’re seeing an alternate universe, everything that happened with Picard, Sisko, et. al. is “erased from the future”. Star Trek calls these things “timelines” and that’s just what Abrams is using to reboot the franchise.

Nimoy returns as Spock (TNG era) in a role beyond cameo and casting throughout is excellent. Kirk is played as every bit the maverick Roddenberry described, while portrayals of Spock, Bones and Scotty breathe new life into tired 1960s performances on limited budgets.

Chris Pine plays a Kirk with a new urgency against Eric Bana’s Nero who isn’t given the time he needs to make any impact, he’s the main villain but he gets woefully too little screentime and character development. Saldana’s Uhura is poorly played, the sultriness she’s trying to project just comes across as cheapness. Yelchin plays a good Chekov, even down to the wonderfully faux Russian accent.

The true star is Zachary Quinto for his exceptional portrayal of Spock who is arguably the main character. Watch the movie as a Spock character development and you’ll see new depths into him which you didn’t think even existed on your first viewing. Excellent stuff.

Now we get on to the bad. The main villain, Nero, is woefully underplayed and comes across as yet another generic madman. He’s no Khan, he’s more Shinzon. In fact the whole thing plays out like a remake of Star Trek: Nemesis, even down to Nero’s ship bearing a strikingly jagged resemblance to Shinzon’s Scimitar. Again it’s a personal grudge, again the Enterprise has to save the world.

The cinematography is, to a word, mixed. There is huge over-use of lens flare and camera shake, it looks more like a concept movie than a true blockbuster. Were they truly not able to buy decent lenses? Is the world in the 23rd century devoid of image stabilisers which 21st century man throws away in cheap hand held consumer electronics?

It almost cheap, as though it’s a made-for-TV movie which somehow burst into a huge budget at the last minute. The camera shakes so much you wonder whether it’s mounted on gelatin and there’s so much lens flare that you think that same gelatin is smeared over the camera’s lens.

That’s where the bad ends. From the start and Kirk’s violent birth, he matures as a rash but brilliant character exactly how Roddenberry imagined his captain. There’s no cheap morality lesson which Star Trek has long been known to fall back on, instead we have a purely great action/sci-fi movie. It’s not Abram’s best but he directs a Kurtzman and Orci story with the kind of passion most movies would sell their bottom lines for.

The Good
Exceptional casting.
The best acting of the year so far.

The Bad
Senseless product placement – Whoever put the Nokia thing in the car should be shot
ABYSMAL cinematography. Lens flare and camera shake like a cheap 1950s B movie.

The Final Word
Crap cinematography, a poor villain and a story which goes a little too fast is propped up by phenomenal acting, exceptional directing and a soundtrack more than complenting a classic which will be talked about in hushed tones years from now.

I had a broken RC car/plane with differential controls. They’re everywhere. This is it from better days:

It was just too fast and too unresponsive for its own good. It also made a very poor glider, so landing had do be done under power which was done at high speed. About 100 metres of open road were needed for a smooth landing. Did I mention it was fast? I was able to put it on the road and accelerate away from an oncoming vehicle doing 20-25 mph.

But imagine what a crash did. Eventually the expanded polystyrene airframe was just too damaged and the ABS plastic motor mountings too damaged to enable stable flight.

At the same time I was making a glider out of the wing of this:

This is because the motor mount of that was utterly crap and even a smooth landing would likely break the prop. Did I mention that as a glider, that plane was so bad that it had a glide ratio of almost 1:1? It had to be run at full power and elevator up constantly, which made for some interesting crashes.

Not long later I had the idea to combine the two and so Failplane was born. A few days ago it was finally completed as this:

It has the electrics of the first RC toy, the wing of the second, wooden stabilisers and a plastic tube to hold it all together. Some stiff transformer primary wire makes the nose cone and impact absorber and two spent batteries act as forward ballast to correct centre of gravity. It’s made of near 100% pure fail. Even the controller has a piece of wire and the end of a fishing rod as an antenna!

Today, in a force 3-4 wind, Failplane made its maiden powered flight. It’d had static engine tests and unpowered gliding tests, but hadn’t actually gone into powered flight. For approximately 30 seconds it near enough hovered in spot fighting the wind until I brought it smoothly down to land. Success!

This brings us to the second part of the post. On launch the second flight, it sharply veered off to the right and made an uncontrolled flight into terrain. A crash. I thought it was taken by a freak gust of wind, but it had more than enough power to handle wind as I’d proven for over a minute in the first flight. Maybe just because it was low and still building up speed it could be toppled easily. In the crash, part of the wing (centre, rear, not an air surface) broke off and the right engine no longer responded to control. It wasn’t airworthy.

Note damage on the left side of the wing as we see it. This is where a clip ripped out of the wing’s material.

As I was to discover, it never had been.

On examining the right motor back on the bench, a power wire had broken off the solder points on the back. Easy enough to repair and most likely crash damage. On applying power only to that motor (it’ll power one motor a time if applied zero throttle but a turn command), it was back running. Success!

No. The motor was producing only a quarter of the backwash of the other side, as measured from a plumb in the airstream. If I listened carefully with only that motor on, it was changing pitch – The revs weren’t constant. Far from being a victim of a gust of wind as I thought, it was likely that this motor caused the crash. Back inside the plane’s tube, the electrics had taken no stress in the crash at all, wires were behind strain reliefs and the electrics had cushioning at all sides. A blue wire had a tell-tale streak of white on it, it’d been stressed most likely when I’d been building the plane or when it was part of the older plane, which also had had problems with that motor.

I nudged this wire, which was the signal/power for the right motor, while the motor was running. Each flex corresponded to a pitch change. Replacing the wire run solved the problem. Failplane’s next flight will be on a calm day and over longer periods than mere testing.

I was told by someone of questionable wisdom that I should relate some past experiences in my blog to give a “feel” for who I am. That was a long time ago.

In November 2007, at the grand age of 26, I’d finally had enough of my wisdom teeth. They came through just perfectly, no crowding, they were more or less straight…But they had very little enamel on them. So they eroded through. Real pain is not childbirth, as women will tell you. Real pain is eating rice with a quarter of a tooth plain missing and a piece of rice getting wedged – jammed – into the hole and straight into the nerve. The nerve there controls your whole lower jaw and directly prodding at it is…discouraged. It’s the kind of pain that can knock you clean out of your chair.

So I told my dentist that I thought it was a bit beyond any possibility of root canal, could I have them out? Surgery was booked for January 2008. Outpatient surgery! General anaesthetic and the lot! The day came around and I’m sat in the waiting room with a PlayStation Portable watching Bourne Supremacy at some queer aspect ratio because PSPVideo9 isn’t very smart. The anaesthetist calls me into a closet and we chat about my medical history. We chat about the drugs they use and I mention that I already took some NSAIDs, he was fine with that, gave me some other anti-inflammatories (you can’t mix drugs of the same type) and we talked a little about their chemical structures and which receptors they (ant)agonise, that sort of lovely stuff and I get changed for the theatre. A lovely surgical gown which opens at the back and is next to impossible to put on alone, but soldier through it I did!

Into surgery I go. The surgeons are poking around with stuff, a nurse puts a cannula in the back of my hand and attaches a tube with the anaesthetic. One surgeon says “In about fifteen seconds you should start to feel light headed, like you’re floating” but a minute later I was still discussing the finer points of opiates through my oxygen mask. I’m about to say the anaesthetic doesn’t appear to be working when a strange smell appears…

…and I wake up in the recovery ward, my train of thought completely uninterrupted even though almost two hours had passed. “Are you feeling okay? Can you see?” some female voice asks. I open my eyes and look around. Nothing’s in focus. “My eyes aren’t working,” I manage to mutter. Then it dawns. “Oh, muscle relaxant.” I have no idea how she understood my garbled speech, but she said “Yes, the surgeons said you knew your drugs. I’m going to wheel you into the ward now.”

I take stock of what’s around me, or what’s in me. Something chewy betweem my teeth. I trace it with my tongue…A slimy appendage, for lack of better words, reaching back to where my wisdom tooth used to be. All four holes, sockets they call them, had these appendages. Made of coagulated blood. I knew not to pull at them, or the clot would come loose and I’d get a dry socket. That’s apparently a lot of pain. My bottom lip was very, very numb. It just wouldn’t move. My mouth was full of blood and my lips would seal themselves with drying blood when I closed them for more than a few seconds.

Hospital policy was that I couldn’t go until I’d taken something by mouth, so they offered me warm (not hot or cold) tea. I couldn’t drink it. My lips wouldn’t make the seal on the liquid to get it into my mouth without it going everywhere. Not only that but my swallow reflex was on manual mode, I had to think about and plan every muscle movement. It’s not a problem until you can’t do it automatically anymore. Half hour later, I still couldn’t drink the tea and a film of blood was all around the cup and floating on top of the tea.

An older matronly nurse, not the sweet young student nurse who’d happily got me some tea, passed me the PSP from under the bed (where my clothes were), no this older matron had the bedside manner of a rottweiler. “You still haven’t drunk that? You’ve been here for ages just watching that silly thing.” I was taken aback. It was all I could do to say “Both my lips are numb and I can’t swallow.” She just walked off. I made up my mind to get the hell out of there ASAP, numb lips be damned. I used my tongue-rolling ability (and you thought it’d never come in useful!) to funnel the tea into my mouth and slowly swallow it. Bit by bit, I emptied that cup. The drapes came around the bed when a nurse asked if I wanted to get dressed, and I got dressed. I made sure all my stuff was present, and I went to the reception desk to be discharged. A quick survey later (or I’d have had to discharge myself) wherein I was given a bye on “Has eaten”, I was free to go. I picked up my tramadol (a fairly mild opiate) from the pharmacy on the way out.

Most wisdom teeth stories involve lots and lots of pain. Mine had none. I felt not even so much as mild discomfort. Oh, and if you don’t *need* opiates, DO NOT take them! They cause constipation. Let’s just say that for a day and half, I shat nothing. The next morning… Watch the scene from Trainspotting. It’s accurate.

Riding home today, I notice a column of light in the sky extending up from the setting sun. It’s a sun pillar. What struck me was that it seemed nobody else at all noticed it and it was pretty bright.

Ten minutes later I got home, grabbed a camera and even though it’d faded away a bit, I managed to get an image of it. (Click to embiggenificate)

These things are notorious for not showing up well in photographs but hey, that’s why we have Photoshop right? A little digital shenaniganry and the photo’s not at all like you’d see it with your eyes but shows the sun pillar much better.

What’s going on here then? Part of the clue is at the top of the image – cirrus clouds. They’re made of ice crystals at high altitude and these crystals form a hexagonal cylinder shape. If they get long, they’re called rods but if they stay short, they’re plates (Snowflakes have the same basic shape) and it’s these plates which cause the sun pillar. As sunlight reflects off the bottom of them, they glint. As they’re very distant and very small, we see their combined light as a glow. As they’re falling from the cirrus clouds, and because they’re falling flat, we see the glow as a column or a pillar.

Look up more, it’s amazing what you can see there.

Note to self: Next time, check the live satellite images for errant thunderstorms before going for a walk in the 2am clear night air.